Daily Terrorism News; WebPage @ www.ChristianAction.Org

A busted terror plot in Britain puts the spotlight on radicalized Muslim professionals

(NewsWeek) What could possibly have inspired Bilal Abdullah, a medical doctor, to ride a blazing Jeep Cherokee into the busy Glasgow airport terminal? Last week Shiraz Maher, a former member of an Islamic fundamentalist group that had tried to recruit Abdullah, told the British media this story:In the ancient university town of Cambridge, Abdullah shared an apartment with a man who played the guitar, apparently not well, and sang off key. Abdullah later “boasted,” Maher recalled, that he had warned his flatmate that if he kept on playing and singing, “I’m going to smash the guitar.” To make his point a little more emphatically, Abdullah popped a video into the DVD player. It showed Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the vicious chief of Al Qaeda in Iraq (killed by an American airstrike last summer), beheading a hostage. “If you think I’m messing about, this is what we do,” Abdullah warned his roommate. “This is what our people do. We slaughter.” (Maher says that Abdullah thought the threat was funny.)Last week every intelligence service engaged in the War on Terror wanted to know: was Abdullah inspired by the example of Al Qaeda in Iraq to try to set off a pair of car bombs in London and then immolate himself on a suicide mission in Scotland? Or was he actually carrying out a mission planned by Al Qaeda in Iraq? The answer is not known, at least publicly. Counterterrorism officials who asked for anonymity discussing sensitive matters told NEWSWEEK that there is some evidence of links between Abdullah (or alleged co-conspirators) and Al Qaeda in Iraq. But they could not be sure if the ties were coincidental and possibly irrelevant—or part of a larger plot. The ineptitude of Abdullah and another would-be suicide bomber, who tried to set himself on fire after the car failed to explode, suggests an amateurish operation. Abdullah and the other man survived, and their car bombs in London turned out to be duds.Still, intelligence officials were asking themselves if the aborted bomb plot was a fire bell in the night. Last week President George W. Bush was once again warning that if America failed to defeat terrorists in Iraq, “they will follow us home.” The president’s many critics learned about Abdullah’s story—how he had been radicalized in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion—and saw the fulfillment of their fears, that the war in Iraq would serve only to breed terrorists, who would, in time, strike out against the West.CONTINUED